Tuesday, July 24, 2012

ARIZONA- Investigators in Arizona keeping a warehouse in the southwestern border town of San Luis under surveillance had discovered this month a recently completed drug tunnel connecting it with San Luis Rio Colorado on the Mexican side of the border.

Engineered with 4-by-6 beams, plywood walls, ceilings and floors, and a lighting and ventilation system, the fully operational tunnel was used to smuggle methamphetamine and possibly other drugs, the DEA said.

"From what I've heard and in my experience, this is probably the most sophisticated tunnel that they've probably found in Arizona," said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the DEA's Phoenix field office.

"It's really a piece of work," he said. "It looks like it was designed to be on a pulley system where you could just download the drugs in San Luis (Rio Colorado, Sonora) and use a pull cart to pull them all the way through and then pop them up on this side."

Coleman said he does not believe the tunnel was in operation for more than a week, based on the "pristine" condition of the shaft and the fact that drums filled with dirt removed from the tunnel were on pallets still inside the building. "I think it was very new," he said.

According to the DEA and Arizona Department of Public Safety, on July 6th, an Arizona State Trooper pulled over a Ford F-150 on US Route 95 in the Yuma, AZ area. A search of the vehicle turned up nearly 40 pounds of methamphetamine wrapped up in packaging in the bed of the truck.

After contacting the DEA, a search warrant was obtained for the warehouse in San Luis where the tunnel was discovered. The tunnel reportedly led to a recently-constructed ice distribution warehouse on the Mexican side of the border.

Police arrested 17 men Wednesday on suspicion of attacking youths and raping five women and girls who were on a church camping trip outside Mexico City, a brutal assault that shocked much of the country.

The attorney general for the State of Mexico, Alfredo Castillo, said 11 of the gang members were identified by some of the victims. In interrogation videos played for reporters, three of the suspects confessed that they sexually abused the women and girls because fellow attackers told them to.

Two of the suspects were local police officers and another had served in the military, Castillo said, speaking two days after authorities announced the arrest of a man who was described as not directly involved in the assault on the camp-out but who allegedly provided information to the assailants.

The attacks, robberies, assaults and rapes took place over a period of several hours on Friday the 13th in the park which straddles the border of the states of Mexico and Puebla. At least 7 girls in the church group were sexually assaulted before their assailants left in stolen vehicles.

According to Mexico's state prosecutor, 12 of the 17 men in custody were identified by the victims as taking part in the assaults and robberies. Reportedly, none of the men in custody have any ties to the major organized crime organizations that have been locked in an ongoing bloody turf-wars since 2006.

Mexican media have begun to question the official account, asking whether the gunfight could have been the result of a falling-out among co-conspirators. If it was an operation to capture traffickers in the act, some said, why did it take 20 minutes for additional police officers to appear after the shooting began? Why were only three police officers sent to arrest two armed fellow officers in a crowded airport?

“Tricks, lies, inventions!” the columnist Manuel J. Jauregui wrote in the Reforma newspaper Wednesday, adding that the operation was an embarrassment and that federal authorities were scrambling to get their stories straight. “They don’t even know who were the good guys and who were the bad guys,” Jauregui wrote.

Two other Federal Police officers are wanted for their role in the airport terminal shooting.

Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said Public Safety Secretary Rafael Lomeli wasn't injured in the blast, but that three neighbors were injured by glass fragments from shattered windows.

Canseco said the bomb was detonated with a cellphone soon after Lomeli arrived at his home. He said the car bomb showed an increased sophistication, both in the detonator and explosives used. It apparently exploded in a car parked just outside a security barrier on a street on which the official's home is located.

The bomb went off just outside a security checkpoint in the capital city of Tamaulipas. No organization has claimed responsibility for the bomb. Two years ago, a car bomb killed three police officers in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, TX.

TEXAS- Drug traffickers may be taking advantage of a boom in natural gas drilling in the Lone Star state to help move their product and circumvent Border Patrol checkpoints around the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas.

Hefty roads running through once-remote ranchlands now enable loaded-down tractor-trailers and pickups to avoid Border Patrol highway checkpoints that have long been the last line of defense for stopping all traffic headed farther into the United States.

Traffickers are seeking to use the southwest-most stretches of the massive Eagle Ford shale formation, which stretches from Mexico all the way to East Texas, to their advantage by trying to corrupt truck drivers, contractors and gate personnel. Authorities also speculate that they are trying to make "cloned" copies of legitimate trucks and use contractor-like vehicles to avoid standing out among fleets of oil-field service vehicles working for energy companies. In some cases, vehicles have been stolen and believed to have been used by smugglers.

"They are using those roads to transport drugs, guns, ammo, you name it," said Albert DeLeon, chief deputy of the Dimmit County sheriff's office.

"Our biggest concern is how law enforcement is going to attack the threat. We cannot move Border Patrol checkpoints into those positions," said Tony Garcia, director for the South Texas HIDTA [High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area- NANESB!]. "It is pretty much up to your imagination what they could be moving through there. ... It is a bit of a dicey situation for us to deal with. We are putting our heads together."

For energy companies, the roads are critical to moving heavy drilling and related equipment in and out of the ranchlands where the work is done.

"Once they get past the checkpoints, they are pretty much free," said Javier Pena, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Houston division, which includes San Antonio and reaches to the Mexican border.

"It is very much on our radar," Pena said of smugglers. "We have been gearing up for it."

He declined to discuss the use of sensors, cameras or other tactics to monitor possible narcotics routes. Authorities also suspect that gate guards, drivers or other workers might succumb to bribes.

On a weekday morning in early March, 18,665 pounds of marijuana were caught being smuggled aboard two trucks, one a flatbed, the other a tanker truck driving through the Briscoe Ranch on a road that circumvents a Border Patrol checkpoint.

They were on a private road leased to energy companies and carrying what looked like supplies typically used in oil field operations but were instead loaded with marijuana. The two trucks yielded the most pot ever caught in one day by the Border Patrol's Del Rio Sector.

One of the truck drivers, who was not an employee of the energy industry, later admitted to agents that he was to be paid $7,500 to deliver the load, according to an affidavit at the federal courthouse in Del Rio.

Other big South Texas catches came in July last year when Border Patrol agents stopped a bogus oil field truck carrying 1,373 pounds of marijuana, and in June when they found 3,529 pounds of the drug stashed in a truck driven by an energy company worker.

In some boder areas in the USA, the Border Patrol sets up additional checkpoints along highways further away from the Mexican border where they can stop and inspect passing vehicles. On some maps, the private roads bypass some of these checkpoints where the contraband can continue on to the interstate highway system and metropolitan areas like Dallas or Houston.